Annually, the European Research Council (ERC) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) allocate resources to promote research excellence in Europe and the USA. We observe that European Union (EU)-based researchers rely strongly on United States (US) collaborations to secure top EU funding, while the reverse is much less common.

Leveraging over 120 million games between almost 1 million players, we find that individuals encounter hot streaks of repeated success, longer for beginners than for expert players, and even longer cold streaks of unsatisfying performance.

Skilled players can be distinguished from the others based on their style. Differences appear from the very first moves of the game, with experts tending to specialize and repeat the same openings while beginners explore and diversify more.

Over time, the opening diversity of a player tends to decrease, hinting at the development of individual playing styles. Nevertheless, we find that players are often not able to recognize their most successful openings.

Here we introduce escape rooms as social laboratory, which allows us to capture at a high resolution real-time communications in small project teams. Our analysis portrays a nuanced picture of different dimensions of social dynamics. We reveal how socio-demographic characteristics impact problem solving and the importance of prior relationships for enhanced interactions. We extract key conversation rules from motif analysis and discuss turn-usurping gendered behavior, a phenomenon particularly strong in male-dominated teams. We investigate the temporal evolution of signed and group interactions, finding that a minimum level of tense communication might be beneficial for collective problem solving, and revealing differences in the behavior of successful and failed teams. Our work unveils the innovative potential of escape rooms to study teams in their complexity, contributing to a deeper understanding of the micro-dynamics of collaborative team processes.